@GenjiKilpatrick, explain to me WHY we as humans have religion and have had it for thousands of years.

You are arguing against biology and human nature. You can't argue away biology and human nature. You can only protect yourself -- and others -- from its negative effects.

Hence laws, and specifically the separation of church and state.

As always, we actually agree -- I think religion does a great deal of harm in the world. I want the Constitution to protect me from it. I applaud atheists who are coming out of the closet and advertising their presence in the world -- I think that is a brilliant strategy in a crazy world, and is saving the lives of secularists trapped in the Bible Belt and evangelical homes.

But you cannot force your views onto others, genji. As angry as you are at religion and the police, you are just as guilty as they are at wanting to force your viewpoint onto the world.

All we have are laws between us and them. Use those laws.

We always end up in the same place, don't we, genji? You are so angry and are howling into the wind. I stand back and say -- yep, there's the wind, let's build a wall.

Ah well.

An overdue thank you from me is in order. Dōmo arigatō, Mr. Shepboto.

I see that you got your gold star. Congratulations. Use your powers for evil, not good. Good is for suckers.
In reply to this comment by Shepppard:
>> ^Shepppard:
I swear to god when i'm gold star, this is the first video i'm promoting.
So, at the rate i'm going now, enjoy the promote in another 2 and a half years KP.


We're a year ahead of schedule, but *Promote anyway!

>> ^Shepppard:
I swear to god when i'm gold star, this is the first video i'm promoting.
So, at the rate i'm going now, enjoy the promote in another 2 and a half years KP.


We're a year ahead of schedule, but *Promote anyway!

*quality.

I'm completely OCD about tags. (No surprise to most of you.) Bad tags not only lead to difficult searches, but they make siftbot's dupe detection damn near impossible when you're submitting a video. Also, it's hard to fix a dead video when you use a vague title and shitty tags.

Use the maximum space allowed for tags, and don't separate every word with a comma. Shit like: pink, floyd, dark, side, of, the, moon, us, and, them isn't helpful at all, unless you really want to do a tag search for of, and or the. Just do pink floyd, dark side of the moon, us and them. For ALL your videos. If it ain't got Pink Floyd, then it ain't shit.





Oh alright, Weekend At Bernie's is also acceptable.

Yes, by all means continue to propagate the crazy, stupid ideas of left and right being right of left or left of right. Maybe just a bit off center, or a bit lopsided.

There is no right or left. There is only us and them.

True moral behavior stems from a person's own integrity. It can't just be told to a person, that person has to see why in their own heart immoral behavior is bad. That journey is personal and can be effected by many things. Environment affects people, but you'll find immoral behavior in rich neighborhoods and bad ones. In a rich neighborhood the person is content, so they wont outright show their bad sides.. but we've seen enough politicians give us an example of how it can manifest behind the scenes.

I think it's better for a person to do their own moral searching then to be taught it through religion. There's far more integrity when the person self enlightens themselves, though if they take religious teachings as metaphor and it helps illuminate the path then that's something. But if it's through fear of hypothetical consequences of the afterlife builds the wrong kind of person, imo. They feel self elevated, "I'm going somewhere good, and you're not...", which is more like a gang mentality. Plus if a person feels they're going to heaven, they're on the right side of the fence.. then maybe they can bend the rules a little while they're still around. They're saved after all right?

The most moral and ethical people I've gotten to know got to where they are using their own minds and establishing what's truly right or wrong themselves. I like how 'liberals' had to be brought up in this discussion. Some would no doubt call the friends I mentioned liberals, I just call them normal people. Seems conservatives have this need to label everyone into groups, us and them. Guess it's easier then trying to understand people as individuals. Also helps to project one's bias views.

Sorry it took so long to respond, I had a busy weekend.

They are not simple probabilistic events, and they are operating off the same basic principles, that does not mean that systems do not have qualities which their component parts lack.

Does a piston have the capacity to convert petrol into kinetic energy? Does an internal combustion engine have this capacity? Which part of the engine imbues it with this power?

Systems are qualitatively different from their component parts, and some sets of systems, such as systems which decide, are qualitatively different from systems which don't

I'm going to need a definition of "decide" I suppose. It seems like you are dancing around these squishy intuitive concepts instead of having a specific physical distinction to point out. The amoeboid is composed of a lipid bilayer membrane riddled with intricate protein micro-machines that detect changes in the environment, and behaviorally compensate. To discount the intricacy of the mechanisms of genetic expression and chemical signaling that exist even in the simplest of eukaryotic organism is foolish IMHO. Many of the modern models of genetic expression, and compensation for environmental factors look strikingly similar to the connectionist network models of the brain. The computations are similar in the abstract.


You are anthropomorphizing the mold, it does move, this motion increases its chances of finding food, it survives/reproduces. It in no way displays evidence of doing any of this "in order" to accomplish some goal. If you want to suggest that evolution, as a system, displays intelligence, by selecting molds which move in certain ways, I would be willing to acknowledge that intelligence, not a consciousness, but an intelligence.

Well, more likely I'm moldopomorphizing us. What goals do we have that are ultimately distinct from survival, reproduction, and the general continuity of our species? Even something as seemingly unrelated as making music, or art could be cast as some sort of mating ritual. When you somehow separate our behavior from the rest of life on Earth it's as though you want to draw a barrier between us and them. You want to somehow separate us from the natural order. I hate to break it to you, but it just isn't so. We are just demonstrate the spatial heterogeneity of the second law of thermodynamics.


Why is context necessary for experience? What do you experience in infinitesimal time? Why should we posit some sort of experience which is entirely distinct from the type we claim to have?

I experience the moment. In fact, that's all I'm ever experiencing, although my sensation of it may run a little behind. I never experience my memory, I merely compare my experience to memory. Further, what I'm suggesting is not entirely distinct from any experience we claim to have. Some autistic individuals, for instance, report an extremely chaotic existence, in which causal models can't be formed as sensory modalities are not unified in the same way as ours. They are experienced as independent inputs, not reflective of a coherent physical world. Still, they experience it.

Physical laws are not obeyed, they are enforced. electron movements are completely deterministic, like billiard balls, they roll down hill, they don't decide if/when to do so.

Things can not be enforced without an enforcer. Further, as you've conceded the determinism of our brains, again, how are we not passively allowing the laws of nature to push us around? What exactly are we deciding?


I don't believe that you are claiming that electrons have tiny field sensors which feed into a neural network which analyzes them for patterns and then attributes meaning to them by comparing them to earlier similar sensation patterns. Perhaps you can state this more clearly.

No, I believe that by some other physical mechanism, likely involving quarks and particle physics that I admittedly have a poor understanding of, the electron receives information from not immediately proximal locations, and physically displaces itself to a location with more desirable properties given its current energy state. I don't see how that's different than cuddling up to a warm fire.


You seem to be positing that the structure of the universe is not topological, but that it is instead the consequence of 10^80 atoms all working on concert to decide what the laws of the universe are at this moment. If this is your thesis I am inclined to ask on what basis you think it is even vaguely likely that they would came to a consensus, such as they must to allow the functioning of a universe like ours.

Something like that , although I still don't like the word decide. I don't necessarily think they do come to a consensus. It's just that, as with an attractor network, or similar guaranteed convergence dynamical systems, certain macroscopic states are just more likely than others, despite chaos at the subordinate level. The reason I'd rather drop the word decide is because I don't necessarily want to open the door to something like free will. To cast it in a "God" metaphor, I imagine more of an omniscient God, than an omnipotent God.


Please provide some basis to believe that there is a phenomenal experience.

I can't other than to refer you to what I presume you to have. I could suggest focussing on your breathing, or what have you. I can point you towards literature showing that people that claim to focus on their consciousness can perform physical feats not previous considered possible (for instance monks rewriting the books on the physical tolerance of the human body to cold). Otherwise, I can't. I will say this, however, I take it to be the atomic element of inductive reason. The natural "laws" you are taking as primary are secondary. There is a simple reason for this as Alfred North Whitehead pointed out. If suddenly we were to observe all bits of matter floating away from one another, and were to confirm we were not hallucinating, and perhaps have the experience corroborated by our colleagues, it would not be the experience which was wrong, it would be the laws of nature. Experience has primacy. Matter is merely the logical consequence of applying induction to our particular set of shared experiences.


And that will persist as long as we are not talking about anything. You say "X exists". I say "What is X?". You say "You can't disprove X". And here we are talking about nothing.

I told you, in the best english I can, what X is. It's the qualia of phenomenal experience. Now I can't provide you with direct evidence for it, but I can tell you that nearly everyone I talk to has some sense of what I mean.


You must be using an alternate form of the word "believe". How can someone believe something, and simultaneously be completely unwilling to assert that it is a fact?

I take the Bayesian sense of the word. All probabilities are subjective degrees of belief. I adopt this degree of belief based on anecdotal experience and generalizations therein. None of this would be accepted as evidence by any reviewer, nor should it, and thus I wouldn't want to risk my credibility by asserting it as fact. I can believe some hypotheses to be more likely than others on the basis of no evidence, and in fact do all the time. That's how I, and all other scientists, decide what experiment to run next. I should not, however, expect you to believe me a priori, as you may operate on different axioms, and draw from different anecdotal experience. Thus, I would not feel compelled to assert my beliefs as fact, other than in so far as they are, in fact, my beliefs.

^ I actually meant in fragments

http://www.videosift.com/video/Making-of-The-Dark-Side-of-the-Moon-Us-and-Them
http://www.videosift.com/video/The-Making-Of-The-Great-Gig-In-The-Sky
http://www.videosift.com/video/Pink-Floyd-members-discuss-recording-Money
http://www.videosift.com/video/On-The-Run-How-Pink-Floyd-made-this-awesome-track

Well done WP, you spouted out a really nice long post up there ranting about how much crap liberal people spout crap without backing any of it up.... without backing up your refutation of any of it... nice work, and a fine example of Right Wing bullshit.

Shout and scream about how wrong the other side is without ever actually providing any viewpoint, facts or figures of your own.

Dick.

And you'll notice that Psychologic has only upvotes while you have only downvotes. Why? Because you're an aggressive 'us and them' dickwad, where Psychologic put across a point of view in a perfectly reasonable manner.

>> ^chilaxe:
However, conservatives generally didn't object to the election of Bush, to the invasion of Iraq (indeed, they felt even questioning it was beyond the pale), to McCain joking about bombing Iran, to enhanced interrogation/torture, or to the GOP's general anti-science attitude (fruit flies, honey bees, etc.), so it doesn't seem reasonable to say conservatives didn't support these things and it was only Bush's fault. Most conservatives are neocons under that definition.


Uh, no. A neocon is a conservative on some topics (say, taxes) who believes in big government. It has nothing to do with anti-science (which is an embarassment to me) or the other topics, I guess, beyond the fact that normal conservatives agree with neo-cons on some of the topics.

Part of the problem is that our society is so highly polarized into an us-and-them mentality that people think that if you agree with President Bush on one topic, you do/should agree with him on all topics. And to a certain extent it's true - a lot of conservative senators voted for Bush's stimulus bill, but voted against Obama's (when they suddenly rediscovered they were for small government, because Bush was gone).

Excellent gorillaman.

The first post on this page is outrageous, i can barely stomach the whole thing. Comparing ideals which exclude people on the basis of their skin to the suffragette movement?

So you think excluding people based on their race/colour/creed is comparable to NOT EXCLUDING PEOPLE BASED ON THEIR RACE/COLOUR/CREED (gender) !?!?!??!?!?!?

The BNP have specifically preyed on people in areas who are subject to racial differences and problems. They have thinly veiled their racist and neo-nazi policies behind a virtually transparent curtain of patriotism.

It's sick and disgusting that great britain - a country we once were proud to say that our empire, for a time, stood ALONE against a rising tide of opression which threatened the world - has become a country in which neo-nazi high-rankers (literally, one quit his neo nazi group to take a position at the BNP) can get into a position of vocal power.

Welcome to germany in the 1930's. A rising popularity grows for a party which claims that <x> are the source of your problems, we can do better without <x>. This time, we have history to look back on and realise - QUICKLY - the road we're going down.

The people who voted for the BNP are unreservedly stupid. a) for not realising these thinly veiled racist policies, and b) for not realising that their vote is going to a party of people AS STUPID AS THEY ARE.

The BNP recently made a poster saying "BRITISH PEOPLE FOR BRITISH JOBS!" - featuring a picture of 3 white AMERICANS stood in front of a union jack patting each other on the back. There's a reason not to vote for them. At least our more popular parties would have been crafty and devious enough to not do something so stupid!

Pprt - in one very small sentence, you hit on the truth - that our lazy, careless, empire building MPs in the popular parties do not realise that the backhanded, underhanded, sneaky and elusive tactics they use for governing are hurting us and them in the long run. Or worse, they probably know it and DON'T CARE. They're in it for themselves, not us. But that is NO excuse for letting racists into our government.

Thank you again, my Floyd brutha!

In reply to this comment by moodonia:
*promote

You have been awarded 1 Power Point for fixing the embed code for Dead Pool video Pink Floyd - "Us And Them" versus World War I. Thank you for helping maintain VideoSift's reliability.

Thank you, my brother.

In reply to this comment by dystopianfuturetoday:
*promote

Tags for this video have been changed from 'pink, floyd, dark, side, of, the, moon, us, them' to 'pink floyd, dark side of the moon, us and them' - edited by kronosposeidon